Blaze a trail to travel’s new frontiers

They say there’s nowhere new under the sun. They’re wrong. Stephen Bleach reveals the latest trips, from remote beaches to undiscovered jungles

The Church of St George, Lalibela, Ethiopia (Edward Oest/360cities.net)

Sometimes it seems all the
world’s been colonised by tourism. Burma? Thronged with retired accountants
from Cheam. Peru? Crawling with Swedish backpackers. Is there nowhere left
to discover?

Happily, the world’s not as small as we’re sometimes told. There are plenty of
destinations that were previously well-nigh impossible to visit — because of
politics, logistics or sheer inaccessibility — and are only now being opened
up to travellers. If you want to leave the crowds behind, here are the trips
that will take you the extra mile... or thousand.

Kurdistan, Northern Iraq
Kurdistan has been off the traveller’s map for decades — Saddam Hussein’s
brutal repression and the subsequent turmoil saw to that — but now it’s
safe, allowing you to take a journey back to the birthplace of civilisation.
There’s the citadel of Erbil, which claims to be the most ancient
continually inhabited city on earth (8,000 years old, give or take); the
Jerwan